REU Site: Physics and Astronomy Research at Rutgers University

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This REU site will bring ten students per summer to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers, where they will spend ten weeks doing forefront research in astronomy, particle (nuclear and high energy) physics, condensed matter physics, and physics education. The students will also engage in a program of field trips and professional development activities that educate them about the conduct of research and the prospects for careers in (and beyond) physics and astronomy. Most participants will be rising juniors and seniors, recruited from a diverse set of undergraduate institutions. REU participants will include significant numbers of students from groups underrepresented in physics and/or institutions with limited research opportunities. By improving their capabilities and confidence in doing research and arming them with the information and tools they need to define and achieve their educational and professional goals, the REU site will broaden participation in the physics and astronomy communities. The program also deliberately incorporates elements intended to stimulate a ripple effect, as students return to their home institutions and bring their experiences to bear on the engagement of their peers in science and research. In a mixture of formal and informal settings, students will benefit from interacting with each other, with their faculty mentors and assigned graduate student "near-peer" mentors, with Rutgers undergraduate physics and astronomy majors, and with a diverse co-residential peer group from outside Rutgers working in completely different scientific fields. The central objective is to provide the same high-quality mentorship and guidance to REU students from outside Rutgers that the department’s own students have been receiving for many years. REU participants will engage in cutting-edge research in multiple areas, presenting the results of their work in two formats at the end of the summer program as a prelude to presenting it at a professional conference (and in many cases, working towards a refereed paper) during the ensuing academic year. The faculty mentors involved in this proposal, are a vibrant, collegial, intellectually diverse, well-funded, and award-winning set of scientist-educators with exciting research programs and excellent records of working with undergraduates. Their extensive mentorship experience stems from strong commitments to undergraduate research by the department and university, including the Research in Science and Engineering (RiSE) program, which will be a key partner.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.